The Goal of Faith...According to Paul

In Christianity we make our own priorities, and much of the time they say more about our culture than they do our faith. It's an odd coincidence that the people the Church rejects most concertedly and vocally are minority groups culturally as well. The bible, on the other hand, shows us a God who rejected the socially dominant groups in the first century: the religious elite, the fabulously wealthy, those at the top of the power and status ladders. The principle is a simple one: all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God (Romans 3.23). We are all saved on an equal basis; by faith and faithfulness.

After a critique of endless genealogies that promote speculations compared to divine training that is known by faith (or "faithfulness", depending on your translational philosophy...1 Tim 1.4), Paul drops a bomb in 1 Tim 1.5:

But the aim of such instruction is love from a pure heart, a good conscience and sincere faith (again the Greek word 'pistis' can go either way, "faith" or "faithfulness")

Lest that fly by us without impact, consider what Paul is not saying: the goal is not perfect behavior; the goal is not astute learnedness; the goal is not status in the Christian community (the Religious Elite had that); the goal is not this set of political beliefs or that set; the goal is, as it always is with Paul, love. He does the same thing in 1 Corinthians 13, right in the middle of a dense discussion on spiritual gifts (1 Cor 12-15). This is not a regular ol' love, the best that we can produce from our most concerted efforts; no, this is love from a katharas kardias...love from a purified heart, implying an outside agent that has accomplished the purification. We can't drum this up. It will never be a product of our emotional efforts. We'll never get it aside from an act of revelation from God.

Paul doesn't stop there though. He knows that there's more to it. We also must have a suneideseus agathes...a good conscience. Notice again what Paul does not say: he does not say a "clean" conscience. Don't you think he would have said that if that's what he'd meant? It's not like Greek doesn't have terms available to say that very thing. Paul means that we must have a conscience that is in good working order, one that points us toward what God desires and away from the things he doesn't. It's like having working smoke alarms in your house.

Paul rounds everything off with pisteus anhypokritou...a genuine faith. This is the product of the first two elements; it grows organically and can't be faked or forced. We can't broker somebody else's faith; We have to own our version through purification and the application of a working conscience, both of which are established as a work of God, then walked out by us.

In the end, Paul sticks to his usual guns. Love is the endgame, a goal unto itself from which everything else flows naturally. We can't make it up though. All we can do is seek the presence of God, then be open and available. We are plants and God is sunlight. We can't avoid being changed when we place ourselves in his presence.